jfJ!.... . hearsal space for performing-arts groups as well as offices and a ninety-nine-seat black-box theatre. Designed by the firm of Platt Byard Dovell, it is a simple glass tower with stainless-steel brise-soleils, or sun grilles, covering the south-facing façade. The grilles create a splendid tex- ture, and the building manages to appear pristine without being prissy; which is no small achievement amid the cheap, multiplex-theatre glitz that has taken over most of the rest of the block. At night, thanks to a brilliant computerized scheme by the lighting designer Anne Militello, the façade of the building lit- erally becomes a performance. It glows, it flashes, it changes from red to blue 92 THE NEW YORKER, SEPTEMBER 4, 2000 . and then to yellow, orange, and green. Militello's design delivers no stock quotes or news; it exists to advertise nothing except the building itseJL which it does in delicious silence. The lights do not cover up the architecture, like the com- mercial billboards up and down the rest of the street; they are completely in tune with the structure of which they are a part. They make it dance. I n 1981, when the state and the city's urban-renewal plan for Times Square was first announced, the centerpiece was to have been four towers by Philip John- son and John Burgee that would have made a rather monstrous matched set. Each of them had a granite front that appeared to be pasted onto a huge mass that was topped by a glass mansard roof There were big arches at the bases of the buildings, which were to have risen pretty much straight up, with almost no setbacks. They would have appeared even bulkier than the towers that are now being built-at once frilly and grotesquely large, sort of like elephants in tutus. The Johnson buildings were postmodernism's revenge, and it is not surprising that almost no one had a good word to say about them. A slow market for office space and political opposition to the redevelopment plan-and not just the awfulness of the design-did the buildings in, but the difference between the Johnson project and what has gone up in its place shows what enormous changes have occurred in the main- stream of commercial architecture in less than twenty years. At one point in the ear ly nineties, Johnson and Burgee were sent back for another try; and they came up with a bi- zarre proposal for four towers that were identical in size to the first group, but this time each one was sheathed in a dif- ferent architectural garment. One was vaguely in the style that was then coming to be called Deconstructivist, with all kinds of disparate parts; another was a variant on the mansard-roofed post- modernism of the first scheme; and still another had a kind of sleek, abstracted modernism to it. Nothing in the revised design seemed to have much to do with the site itself There was something al- most desperate about the proposal, but by throwing everything into the pot the architects inadvertently hit on the be- ginnings of the kit-of-parts aesthetic that now holds swa If there's anything that raises the level of the new Times Square skyscrapers and makes their designs more than mere entertainment, it's the way that their ar- chitects have tried to relate the buildings to their surroundings. The Condé N ast Building, which occupies one of the busiest corners in the world, is a dy- namic, zestful presence. On the other hand, sometimes architects try too hard to justify the complicated, inconsistent tone of their work as a reflection of the complicated, inconsistent tone of the cityscape. Bruce Fowle, for example, ex- plained the design of the Condé Nast